Wednesday, December 5, 2012

An interactive guide to energy use

The journal Nature has published an interactive guide to the world's energy use, available here.
You can find out which countries are using which resources (in 2011). There are some surprises. For example, I knew that mainland China and the US are large consumers of coal and oil energy. But they are also the largest consumers of hydro and renewable energy as well. I expect that's because the largest consumers of energy are going to be the largest consumers regardless of the source. If you think I'm wrong, please let me know via the comments.

You get a sense of the issue in these screenshots:

Coal:

Oil:

Hydro/Renewable

It's an interactive guide, and I selected a few countries to illustrate what I found. I tried to be reasonably representative of established and emerging economies while keeping the charts small enough to see. (Note - you will have to click through to the Nature page to interact with the data yourself.)